Theorycrafting, Computations, and General Observations from a Shadow Point of View

Usual disclaimer: the following information is as of the Mist of Pandaria Beta build 16004, released on August 17, 2012, and may not be accurate once future patches are released.

For a primer on this post, please see the original post from July 30, 2012. To see the previous set of changes, please see this post from Tuesday.

Two builds were released at the tail end of this past week, each containingsignificant buffs to abilities that were previously nerfed. Mind Blast was buffed first by 25% and then by 10%, equaling out to a 16.875% buff if the initial nerfs never occurred, while Mind Flay and Devouring Plague are still down from their peaks a few builds ago.

Lets see how this changes things:

We’re back over 100k DPS in most cases, and we’re even over 110k DPS in some Patchwerk sims! The sky is not falling! Hallelujah!

From Darkness, Comes Light is still on top of all sims not named Heavy Movement. The delta between the highest and lowest DPS for each fight type continues to stay close (or shrink in some cases), only being a few thousand DPS apart in most cases (Heavy Movement not withstanding):

As you can see, as raid events get introduced the viability of certain talent combinations drops significantly. We can see this from the data in the table above. No movement causes the DPS to vary by 2.47% when there is no movement (Patchwerk), then it jumps a bit when you introduce a little bit of movement (Light Movement) or predictable periods when casting will be limited (Ultraxion). When more raid events are occurring the gap widens by over 2% (Helter Skelter) while it jumps by extreme amounts when you have very little time to stand still and cast (Heavy Movement).

It isn’t surprising to see certain ability combinations shine in different environments, but the large delta on Heavy Movement fights has not closed at all since I started doing my detailed analysis. Blizzard has stated that they want to make the various talent combinations roughly equal and have done a fairly good job for the most part for all talents not called (or paired with) Shadow Word: Insanity. If there is any movement involved in a fight (and, as always, there isn’t a strongly compelling reason to take it), stay away from Shadow Word: Insanity like the plague.

Averaging all of the sims together we end up with (roughly) a 9.4k DPS increase averaging just above a 9.5% DPS increase. The biggest winner (on average) for raw DPS amount were Patchwerk (10112 DPS) followed by a near tie with Light Movement (9833 DPS) and Ultraxion (9823 DPS). The largest gains from a percentage increase point of view was for Heavy Movement (9.68%), while all others were hovering a few tenths of a percent behind (around 9.5%).

Crit is pulling ahead slightly once you’ve surpassed 8085 Haste. I attribute this change mostly to the large amount of buffs to Mind Blast in the two most recent builds. The value of Hit/Spirit has also risen because, again, missing a big nuke is going to hurt your DPS.

In other news, I’ve been busy adding items to my Best in Slot list database in preparation for posting a “pre-raid” BiS list over at HowToPriest.com which will go live hopefully sometime next week. The major limiting factor on completing this has been the generation and simming of a T14 normal modes “best in slot” gear set that is below the SWP+2 and DP+2 Haste Breakpoints to give accurate stat weights for not only my main Best in Slot but also for this new pre-raid list. Expect to see a post about this soon.

Notes and Resources

The SimulationCraft profiles changed slightly from the last post to this one.

Each of these SimulationCraft sims were run with 25,000 iterations rather than the usual 100,000 iterations in an effort to provide data as quickly as possible (e.g.: before yet another beta build was released).

These sims were for fights that are single-target. Multi target fights may (will) have different results.

These sims are as of Mists of Pandaria Beta build 16004, released on August 17, 2012. Once a new build comes out, these values will no longer be 100% valid!

Is it possible to simulate what happens in a 2 target fight, there 2 in the first raid instance itself, I tried simulating on target dummies by keeping VT and SWP up on both targets and using FDCL+DI and SWI+DI as talents, FDCL+DI came up much higher but I am not sure if thats because of RNG or actually it is better.

With Adds I think FDCL+TOF will be better as we will get the buff for under 20% as the adds die at several places in the fight.

Appriciate if you can cover this, Thanks for all the analysis.. great work

Doing 2-target sims is absolutely on my to-do list, Sudhir. The main issue I’m running in to with SimulationCraft, last I checked a few weeks ago, is that multitarget support is limited at best, while simming with adds bugs out when you have TOF selected (the buff doesn’t last the exact amount of time it should — sometimes more, sometimes less). I’ll check on it again and see if I can get anything up and running.

I agree with you that in a fight with adds that don’t die right away (I.E.: it is worth the GCD to put at least SWP on them) FDCL and TOF will be the best choices.

Crit is better than Mastery because Mastery only affects 5 spells in total: SWP, VT, DP, MF, and Mind Sear (and only the tick damage, NOT the on-hit). Crit affects every spell we cast, even Mastery proc’d ticks. If the damage on our DoTs were buffed and the damage of some of our non-DoT spells were nerfed, then Mastery’s value might rise above Crit’s again.

In the long run, point for point, Mastery outscales Crit for us, though. This is because, at 90, it takes 600 Crit rating to get 1% Crit, while it takes 600 Mastery rating to get 1 point of Mastery which is 1.8% chance to duplicate the spell.